"Where's he to sleep?" Mrs. Quidmore asked in her tone of discontent.
"I suppose he can sleep in the barn, can't he?"
"I wouldn't put a dog to sleep in that barn, nasty, smelly, rotten place."
"Well, put him to sleep where you like. He'll get three a week and his keep while he's here, and that's all I'm responsible for." Mrs. Quidmore turned and went into the house. Her husband winked at Tom as man to man. "Can you beat it? Always like that. God! I don't know how I stand it. Get in."
Tom got in, finding an interior as slack as Mrs. Quidmore herself. The Tollivant house, with four children in it, was often belittered, but with a little tidying it became spick and span. Here the housekeeping wore an air of hopelessness. Whoever did it did it without heart.
"God! I hate to come into this place," its master confided to Tom, as they stood in the hall, of which the rug lay askew, while a mirror hung crooked on the wall. "You and me could keep the shack looking dandier than this if she wasn't here at all. I wish to the Lord...."
But before the week was out the boy had won over Mrs. Quidmore, and begun to make her fond of him. Because he was eager to be useful, he helped her in the house, showing solicitude, too, on her personal account. A low-keyed, sad-eyed woman who did nothing to make herself attractive, she blamed her husband for perceiving the loss of her attractiveness.
"He's bound to me," she would complain, tearfully, to the boy, as he dried the dishes she had washed. "It's his duty to be fond of me. But he ain't. There's fifty women he likes better than he does me."
This note of married infelicity was new to Tom, especially as it reached him from both parties to the contract.
"God, how she gets my goat! Sometimes I think how much I'd enjoy seeing her stretched out with a bullet through her head. I tell you that the fellow who'd do that for me wouldn't be sorry in the end...."